During the telecommunications-equipment giant’s keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show Wednesday, Chief Executive Hans Vestberg showed how data could be transferred through his body instead of using a cable. He touched a special pad on a smartphone and a similar pad on a large TV screen, and the image on the smartphone popped up on the big display.

The technology, which has just emerged in prototype form from the company’s labs in Sweden, is called capacitive coupling. And there are many potential uses if it can be perfected, Vestberg said, besides acting like a human USB cable.

Two people could theoretically exchange electronic equivalents of business cards, for example, by simply shaking hands, the company says. Or they could authorize a payment at a retail store, or authenticate themselves to open a locked door, by tapping their hand on a specially equipped pad.

Jan Hederen, a strategy manager for the company, explains that the underlying principle is based on the idea that we are all made of water–and water conducts electricity. Once electricity can be transmitted, the next step to encode data on it is to modulate pulses and send them through whatever material is being used as a conductor, he says.

Isn’t it, well, dangerous? “That is the big issue,” admits Hederen. But the company has shown that the technology strictly complies with World Health Organization safety standards related to electromagnetic exposure, he says.

And this reporter can say he also briefly became a human cable, during a party sponsored by Wired magazine, and felt no ill effects–other than embarrassment at having his picture lingering on a big TV display for a quarter of an hour.